We are two weeks into the month of September now. I think this might be a reasonable amount of time for some readers to have completed this book if they started early this month. At least I finished it last week. I'll leave this thread pinned for the rest of the month and next weekend I'll create the poll for the next book of the month. That poll will end on the last day of the month and the cycle will continue.
Feel free to include as many spoilers as you want in your comments as the post itself is marked as containing spoilers.
I'm hoping someone else could get started or else I will have to. π
Jazz Hands β« βͺ βͺ β¬
First I know that everyone loves to hate on Amazon and rightly so. Second I am also aware that there are apps that allow you to use audio books from public libraries which is great resource that everyone should take advantage of if they can.
I guess the question I have for you is how quickly do you go through audio books? If it's only 1 or 2 books a month Audible isn't that bad.
For me $15 a month for audible has me more than covered for the audio books I listen to. If I do end up finishing my current book before the next credit of the month there are plenty of podcasts and free audiobooks to listen to to tide me over, or I can go back and re-listen to a past book.
Personally I believe that Audio books should ALWAYS cost significantly more than the original book. The amount of work that goes into an audio book recording is mind boggling in some instances and I am willing to pay to make sure publishers will still provide audio books as options.
wether or not someone should be taking the option of making it a Amazon exclusive is a challenging question. Someone probably laid down a stack of cash with some graphs that said this is our user base. You will get the majority of your plays here anyways and we are willing to pay for it. Does that mean less opportunity overall for readers? Yes. Is it also possible that this ensures a better pay day for the Author, Voice Actor, Editors and Engineers? Also possibly yes. I have no issues with creative getting paid for their work.
listen at work so I can easily get through 3 or 4 books a week. Audible has never been a reasonable value proposition to me as someone who consumes 40-60 hours of audio content a week at 2x speed.
I'll continue taking advantage of cheap or free content, unlimited subscription services, piracy and text to speech AI software until audible can actually compete with those options at a reasonable price point. So yeah, I will listen to this book at some point. I'll be damned if I pay $15 for a single book when I can get an entire unlimited subscription to any other type of media that is far more expensive to produce. Audible is a terrible value in the current media landscape and that has nothing to do with hating on Amazon.
I'm happy for Andy to be able to make a living writing, but keep in mind his origin story with the Martian was self publishing on a website for free. His fans asked for him to make it available on Kindle simply for a better, easier format and he listed it at the minimum price. Now that he is an established author the industry realized they can profit off of him, they want to milk us for all they can.
Let's not pretend audible is putting a fair share in the hands of the creators here. I'm sure Andy and everyone else is doing well for themselves but it's gone far beyond funding the artists.
Your points are fair and you definitely consume a lot of content compared to me (at least where audio books are concerned). If you are OK with piracy then there is no real need to discuss cost and value. Nothing is going to match the value of free. For me Audible is a good value because I won't pirate media and their is enough content there (a token a month combined with included free content) to keep me occupied basically forever.
The thing that I can't figure out qnd no one has been able to explain to me is this: If no one pays for content or is only paying a small amount for unlimited access, how are the artists and content creators going to make a living?
In an ideal world every creator would be able to crowd source their success like Andy did/slash Brandon Sanderson does but I feel like a lot of smaller artists would never gain enough traction to be found by a broader audience.
Other people have pointed out possibilities like Patreon but if I subscribed to the lowest teir of every creator I follow I would be paying an absurd amount of money each month. Probably waaay more than I could afford.
The one thing that I do to try and support artists is that if I find myself consuming their content on a larger scale compared to my other stuff I will find a way to purchase physical media from them. Be it a book from Andy, A vinyl record from Devin Townsend, or a chalk bag from Magnus Midtbo. That way more of my money goes to support them as directly as possible. Piracy and unlimited subscription models just don't fit the way that I consume content.
If you have other ideas on what we can do to properly support content creators, get exposed to smaller unknown creators from around the globe, and get rid of money going into the hands of giant corporations I am all ears.
Libraries have existed for centuries and somehow books are still being sold. Philosophically I believe information should be free and piracy is functionally the modern equivalent of libraries.
Piracy is a service and access problem. When the only subscription you needed was Netflix to get all the best content I didn't pirate TV. That landscape is changing rapidly and I'm back to flying the Jolly Roger for any shows or movies I might want to watch. I'd genuinely prefer not to pirate if it means supporting the creators, easier access and a fair price.
That said I do support creators I like and I've happily spent money on everything from YouTube memberships, patreons, Kickstarters, podcasts, etc. I tend to prefer ways of supporting that cut out the egregious publishing industries, in fact that's a large part of how I became a fan of Andy Weir in the first place.
As far as discoverability goes, I think it's easier than it's ever been, we're far past the need for publishers to get content out there when it comes to indie books, music, videos and games. Though I do agree it can be hard for people starting out. There has to be a perfect storm of quality + viral success, but that's not much different to landing a publishing deal.
In a perfect world I'd like to see an open standard for multimedia. I should be able to browse for media on a protocol similar to federation or HTML, where I can connect to that protocol with a media browser of my choice, and the monetization is set by the creators instead of the platform they're hosted on. That's a bit of a pipe dream, I know, but it's always felt strange to me that I need a dozen different locked down apps for each service when I'm functionally consuming the same type of media across all of them.
At the same time we are inevitably moving toward a future where automation will render obligatory employment obsolete and impossible for everyone, so we will need to figure out how to take care of more than just artists. I do think that would play a massive role in how we look at copyright all together.